This morning while driving to work I started thinking about how Apple’s iPhone had captured the mobile market and displaced former leaders like Nokia and Blackberry. A similar analogy is how Netflix displaced top video rental stores like Blockbuster. Both these companies have one thing in common: their ability to innovate. How did they manage to innovate?

Innovation comes from within. When employees start thinking about strategic business problems and work to find ways in solving those problems, that’s when magic happens. If there’s something we can learn from history, it’s that we need to innovate to stay relevant. Digital Cohesion ushers in an era of innovation and possibilities. But to truly embrace it organizations need to ensure that their IT workforce is working on new things and not spending their time in just keeping lights on. How do you free your resources and encourage your IT workforce to innovate?

We humans despise change, new place, new job, new friends always give fright. But sometimes we have to go through the change process, one such event is the virtualization wave sweeping through the networking world. Service providers having to manage the unprecedented growth of traffic in their network and the need from their customers to enable customizable services are planning to virtualize certain network functions including edge routing, mobile packet core, IMS and such.

Even though this change is inevitable, it does not have to be painful. This is one of the key differentiators for the recently launched vMX platform from Juniper Networks. vMX is the virtualized version of the industry leading edge routing platform, running the virtualized control plane (Junos) and virtualized forwarding plane (Trio PFE). This approach provides a consistency in operation from physical to virtual environment so that operators do not need to get trained on new operating system and utilize the familiar processes to configure and manage the hybrid (virtual + physical) networks.

vMX was launched at Juniper’s EMEA AR/PR summit on November 6th. Stuart Borgman ran the demo of vMX to highlight some of the key value propositions, you can watch the recorded version of the demo to appreciate the fact that indeed change can be non-disruptive.

When the automotive industry found out, in the middle of the 60s, that most of their customers weren't particularly happy to drive the exact same vehicle as everyone else, this started a revolutionary change. Luxury cars had this problem solved with their traditional approach of almost hand-made models, but of course not everyone could afford that. The conventional manufacturers adopted a new concept: mass customisation.

“Bring Your Own Device” is rapidly becoming big nightmare for CIOs and IT departments all over the world. The phenomenon implies employees demanding to use their own iPads, MacBooks and Ultrabooks, Android phones and tablets, and so on, to access corporate applications and data.

In the blog I discuss the opportunities for the Service Providers to monetize this tred.